BYDALE. JULY 1926
Kay and George wandered on horseback through the leafy canyon. They crossed the brook and climbed into craggy hills. “Do you hear that?” George pulled back on the reins. His horse, Ella, snorted, shook her head, and paused.
“Hear what?” asked Kay. She stopped hers, Klyde.
“That music,” said George.
She listened. “I hear the stream. The leaves in the breeze. Is that what you hear, George?”
He stared into the forest. “All that, yes,” he said. “And that damned music.”
“As in… a melody?” asked Kay.
“An entire orchestral setting,” said George.
She shook her head. “It’s in your mind.”
“All music’s in your mind,” said George. “Otherwise, it’s just sound.”
They spread their blanket on a cliff overlooking the gorge and the creek. “Think about it,” George elaborated. “What is a melody? A string of notes. But you only hear one at a time. By the time you hear the next note, the one before is gone. And the rest of the song doesn’t exist yet. The whole song never actually exists, except between your two ears.”
“And on paper,” observed Kay.
“Yes, but that’s not music,” insisted George. “That’s a representation of music.”
“And a painting is a representation of a thing,” said Kay. “But that doesn’t make it not art.”
George shook his head. “No. A painting is not a representation of a thing. A painting is a thing.”
Kay shook her head at the absurdity of this debate. “In any case, if there are no instruments, there’s no music.”
“That’s not true, either,” said George. He bit into an apple and changed the subject. “I paint, too, you know. One day we’ll fill a gallery with my oils. And folks will flock to it. Don’t laugh.”
She did not laugh. She smiled.
He set up an easel in the front room and began work on a new portrait. “I’m going to paint someone everyone will recognize,” he told Kay, propping a mirror next to the easel while she warmed up at the piano playing scales and arpeggios.
As the painting took on the form of a self-portrait, Kay had to admit he had talent. Using broad strokes in blues, grays, beiges, and maroon he sought to shed light not on his playful nature but on his darker, contemplative side.
While George painted he wondered aloud: What was the role of hero worship in the appreciation of music, or any of the arts? Would Beethoven’s music be the same without that face of his? His scowl had so much to do with the myth that surrounded and enhanced his music, in George’s view.
“Maybe he used his music to sell his delusion of grandeur,” said Kay.
“It’s not a delusion when it’s true,” said Gershwin.
“Would it be true, if he had written the same music but the world didn’t recognize his genius?”
“No,” said Gershwin.
She hired a high school athletics coach to teach them tennis, and they practiced an hour each day after their lesson. They shared an unsuspected trait: they both hit the ball hard. They played piano mornings, afternoons, and whenever in the bright front room. He composed—assiduously, furiously—an overture and songs for a new show that he decided to call, Oh, Kay! She transcribed melodies and chord progressions and commented on his counterpoint. He ingested her knowledge like a famished schoolboy at a banquet.
George demonstrated compositional tricks he had learned from Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin, both innovators in his estimation, and from private teachers he had hired over the years, Charles Hambitzer, Rubin Goldmark, Henry Cowell, and Joseph Brody, who had introduced him to new, sometimes contrasting ways of thinking about harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and rhythm. Despite his reputation as a self-taught genius he had continuously studied music theory since his youth, though never in recognized institutions.
He never claimed, however, to understand music. Its essence remained a mystery to him. If he was humble about anything, it was this.
In the evening, they found German editions of Heine’s poetry and Kafka’s Der Prozess in James’s bookshelf, as well as a copy of Ulysses, printed in Paris. The latter was banned in the United States and the controversy had only enhanced its reputation. Late at night Kay and George slogged through it aloud. George judged Ulysses a dazzling experiment, virtuosic, at times fascinating, but just as often trying and exhibitionistic.
“One thing it’s not,” said George. “It’s not storytelling. Just like Wassily Kandinsky isn’t painting pictures. Just like Schoenberg isn’t writing melodies. It’s something else.”
Much as he wrote modern but melodic music, so in painting George chose a middle ground between realism and abstraction, but erring on the side of realism. He cared about his audience and his first audience was his own ear. Modern harmonies, rhythms, and instrumentation provided freshness if not innovation. But a melody had to seize the listener’s attention and hold it captive or the entire effort collapsed. He knew that much of musical academia disagreed. He did not care.
They talked in semidarkness about the Great War, a wound that had not healed. George wondered whether the war had been a cause, or a symptom, of changes in the culture. Kay asked him to elaborate. “Well,” George mused aloud, “not so long ago, the idea of Europe meant something. It meant certain attitudes about music, and painting, and religion—which is storytelling on the biggest canvas, isn’t it?—and then it all collapsed. It all turned out to be so fragile. What I’m saying is, maybe the change happened first in the culture—Wagner, Debussy, Schoenberg—and the Great War was just the final implosion.”
“So where do we go from here?” Kay wondered. “Beyond abstraction in painting, non-linear narrative, and atonality in music?”
“That’s when your steamer docks at Ellis Island,” said George.
“And what do you find?” asked Kay. “A different scale?”
“A different rhythm,” said George. “Jazz.”
They decided to read something else. Kay went into the salon and came back with the copy of Porgy that Dorothy Heyward had sent.
Sales of the novel, Heyward’s first, had soared, fueled by the near-unanimous enthusiasm of reviewers. The Nation had praised its “poetry and penetration.” The New York Evening Post had described Porgy as “a series of throbbing moments, a ghost of Africa stalking on American soil.” Ellen Glasgow, the prestigious author of the novel Barren Ground, declared that Porgy was destined to become “a classic.” The poet Langston Hughes appreciated “the poetic qualities in the inhabitants of Catfish Row that make them come alive.”
With George, Kay entered the Gullah tenements of Charleston a second time. They took turns reading aloud in bed. The setting reminded George, in ways, of the Lower East Side of his youth. Entranced, they allowed Porgy to occupy them through the night.
The following afternoon Kay found George wandering through the house in his slippers, holding Porgy and looking for something. “You got a phone?”
“Who do you want to call?”
“DuBose Heyward. You got his number?”
“It’s on that note we’re using as a bookmark.”
A few minutes later, the telephone operator rang the line of the author at his home in the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina. “DuBose Heyward, George Gershwin here. My friend Kay Warburg and I cruised through your novel last night, title page right through to…” He flipped to the last line. “Mariah left Porgy and the goat alone in an irony of morning sunlight.” He placed the book on a side table. “I was hoping for some shut-eye but Catfish Row kept calling me back.”
“Why thank you, Mister Gershwin, mighty honored,” DuBose Heyward answered in a thin, wheezy voice.
“Your Porgy, what a fella,” gushed George. “A cripple, dirt poor, no education, a rough seven-card-stud hand, but he knows he’s worthy of this doll. Deserves her more than Sporting Life or Crown. And she knows it, too, but she’s not as strong as he is.”
“Why, thank you kindly, Mister Gershwin. That was precisely my intention.”
“Tell me how you came up with this story, these people.”
“Well,” drawled Heyward, “I used to work the docks in Charleston. I was one of the few whites and many of the others were Gullahs. That is the way I spent my adolescence. As different as the Lord made us they were like family to me and I was always fascinated with the rhythms of spoken language, so naturally I absorbed their dialect.” He paused. “Then one day a few years back I came across a story in the local news about a crippled man who tried to flee the police using his goat cart. The story filled me with compassion and I knew right then that man would be the subject of my first novel.”
“Your compassion hit me hard, Mister Heyward.”
“That means a lot, coming from you, Mister Gershwin.”
“You see, Mister Heyward,” George told him, “I’ve been wracking my brain for a subject for an opera. Any chance we could meet?”
“Why that is a fascinating idea. But I must tell you, my wife is working on a stage adaptation. Porgy has been such a surprising success, she swears there’s a Broadway show in there.”
“I would hate to interfere with your wife’s plans,” said George. “Why don’t you just go ahead and see if you can throw that show together. Let’s talk later, one way or the other.”
“I will very much look forward to that, Mister Gershwin,” said DuBose Heyward. “I am so honored.”
Hanging up the telephone, Gershwin chuckled and shook his head at some inner thought. But his smile dissolved into a frown as he sniffed. “Do you smell that?”
“Smell what?” asked Kay.
“Burning rubber,” said George.
Kay shook her head, laughing.
Olga brought the children for the holiday weekend. Andrea and Kathleen ran around outside, shouting and yelping. But April, the oldest of Kay’s children at seven, shut herself into her room. “Something’s bothering her,” said George.
“That’s how she is,” said Kay. “I’m not happy about it but what am I to do?”
He went upstairs and knocked. Kay followed.
April sat on her bed studying a scrapbook. George entered and sat beside her. “Little Orphan Annie, eh,” he said.
“She cuts them out every day,” said Kay. “And glues them in.”
“What’s it about?” George asked April.
“A girl.”
“How ’bout I read to you?” He moved to take the album from her but she clutched it tightly.
“I didn’t give you permission.”
“April!”
April ignored her mother. “I’d rather be with my dad,” she told George.
“I’ll leave you alone then,” said George. He rose and left, closing the door behind him.
“She’s going through something,” Kay told him, as they went downstairs.
“The kid feels orphaned,” said George.
“There’s a man all over that scrapbook,” said Kay. “Daddy Warbucks. Daddy Warburg, get it? He saves her from the orphanage. Not Mommy Swift. Daddy Warburg.”
Andrea adored Gershwin, whom she called Uncle George. She tromped with him through the forest when he ventured out with his Leica camera. She sat next to him on the piano bench when he improvised. Sometimes the music made her giggle. Sometimes she rolled on the floor laughing. He looked down at her, smiling, while his hands increased the tempo, as if tickling her. Then he stopped and let her recover.
On the afternoon of July Fourth, wearing a beret, George rolled up a newspaper and used it as a megaphone, refereeing a footrace between Andrea and Kay. That night, Benjamin Fairchild drove them all into Greenwich except April, who refused to leave her room. The ice cream shop was offering two double-scoops for the price of one. They sat on the grass and watched star pods burst over the water. They watched flowers of light bloom and fade. Andrea draped her arm around George’s shoulder and leaned into him. Kathleen drifted to sleep. Ice cream melted onto her skirt. Before they left, George asked: “What’s April’s favorite flavor?”
“Strawberry,” said Kay.
He returned to the ice cream parlor, where he bought a half-gallon container of strawberry, a dozen cones, and a bag of Abba-Zaba candy bars.